The wind was stronger in the street. Pedestrians leaned into it, or scurried before it, and made what breaks they could of one another.
Autumn, he thought. Another little tag of time. The tags change, but time stays fixed forever. In the meanwhile, you sit in the static forever and suck cigarettes. In the meanwhile, you sit over endless bourbons and wonder endlessly how persuasion is going, and what forms persuasion takes, and you curse with stale impotence the louse that persuasion profits.
At five-twenty-five he started the car and swung out into traffic. Driving slowly, killing five minutes, making three right turns that brought him back to the street above the bar, he saw then with the inevitable visceral disturbance that she was already waiting for him at the curb, her skirt whipped by the wind around her long legs. He stopped in the traffic lane in defiance of angry horns while she came off the curb and got in beside him. Sliding over against him, she let her head fall back against the upholstery and laughed softly.
“Darling,” she said, “what a relief! You’ve no idea what a bore our dentist is.”
“You didn’t look so bored to me.”
She rolled her head and looked up at his face. “Darling, are you going to be difficult again?”
“I’m sick of Dr. Norton Foresman, that’s all.”
“So am I. Believe me, I was never so sick of anyone in my life before. It’s only because he’s essential. You know that. We’ve got to have him.”
“It’s taking a long time. I never thought it would take so long.”
“We have to be sure. It would be fatal to make a mistake.”
“How much longer?”
“Not long. Not much longer now.”
“Sure. Not much longer. Well, I don’t mind waiting. It’ll be easy. I’ll just drink bourbon and think about the pair of you.”
“You said you wouldn’t brood, darling. You promised you wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Tell me the truth, Etta. Aren’t you rather enjoying yourself?”
“Stop it, Peter.”
“A big, handsome guy like him ought to be very amusing.”
“Damn it, Peter, cut it out! You go on brooding like this, you’ll end up wrecking everything. You’re going pretty sour, you know. Next thing, you’ll be getting violent.”
“Pardon me for going sour. I know it’s unreasonable of me.”
“All right, Peter, all right. Just quit thinking about it. Just think about how it will be when it’s all over. Think about you and me and all the places we’ll go and all the things we’ll do and all the time we’ll have to spend together.”
“And all the money.”
“Yes. And all the money. It wouldn’t be fun without money, Peter. Not for me and not for you. We don’t have to kid ourselves about that.”
His right hand dropped from the wheel to her knee, and he felt her instant response, heard the soft whisper of breath sucked suddenly into her throat. It was always like that. It never failed. His ability to make her respond at once and with intensity was the last remnant of whatever dominance he may once have felt. It sustained him in his sour waiting, in the concession that no man can make and not be sick.
Passing into the suburban area of the city, they began the gradual ascent to the bluff above the river. Crossing the crest of the rise, they dropped down the brief descent to the lip of the bluff and the frail fence along it. The good place for an accident.
Abruptly, he stopped the car beside the fence and looked out and down to the shrunken gray stream in the valley, lean from the long dry months.
“I think I’ll get away for a while,” he said.
Her eyes were briefly startled. “Away? Where?”
“Up to the lodge, I think. Maybe I’ll do some hunting.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Until you’re ready. Until Dr. Norton Foresman has been persuaded.”
“I see.” She picked a cigarette from her purse and lit it with the dash lighter. The smoke piled up on the windshield and spread out in a small, billowing cloud. “I think that might be a good idea. You’re in a dangerous mood, darling. You need to get some of the tension out of you.”
“When you want me, write General Delivery at King’s Center. It’s a little junction development about six miles from the lodge. I’ll drive down every day or so to check.” Twisting suddenly in the seat, he seized her by the hair and jerked her head back. “Say it won’t be long, Etta. Say it again.”
She reacted to his violence with a pleasure that was almost masochistic.
Her mouth shaped against his the pattern of her assurance.
“Soon, darling. Just as soon as I can.”
CHAPTER 5.
The lodge was a rustic, single-story structure of unpeeled logs. It was built into the side of a hill and had acquired with time an appearance of being almost part of the hill. Below the lodge, in the hollow at the foot of the hill, was a clear stream, spring-fed, in which game fish could be taken in season. The surrounding hills were the remnants of an ancient orogeny, their thin top-soil broken by countless outcroppings of rock and nourishing a sparse growth of brush and scrub timber. In the hills were quail and plenty of small game.
Peter hunted sometimes during the day, tramping the hills with a 12-gauge shotgun, and there was something in the country that renewed assurance, an atmosphere of incredible age that reduced passion and violence and all human aberrations whatever to the status of petty absurdity. But the nights were bad. The nights were times of distorted imagery, and he brooded with a growing hatred over the morbid details of Dr. Norton Foresman’s planned corruption.
Every second afternoon he drove down to King’s Center and inquired for mail in the tiny post office. There was no letter the first week, nor the second, but the fourth day of the third week the letter was there. With the current phase of the waiting finished, all the malignancy seemed to drain from him like a poisonous fluid released by incision, leaving him strangely quiet, almost apathetic, and he drove all the way back to the lodge with the letter unopened in his pocket.
He read it in the living room of the lodge in front of the natural stone fireplace:
Darling,
Persuasion complete. Now I must die as quickly as possible. Do you remember the highway restaurant at the junction of 14 and 56 near the Kaw City? Meet me there at nine o’clock the morning of the 15th. I’ll go there from here on the bus. You can drive me on into the city.
It was unsigned. He dropped the envelope and the single sheet of crisp paper on the fire and watched them burn. Her written words were as real as her voice, as if she had whispered them with her lips brushing his ear, and now his brief apathy was gone as quickly as it had come. He felt, sitting there while the papers curled in ash, the first faint lift of excitement, the rhythmic acceleration of his pulse.
The fifteenth. What was today? His stay at the lodge had stretched interminably in a kind of deadly hiatus, and he had to return to the day of his arrival and repeat in his mind the succession of subsequent days to the present in order to locate himself in time. It was the fourteenth, he discovered. Tomorrow was the day.
He packed his few things, killed a bottle he’d been working on, and went to bed. He slept poorly, disturbed by random imagery, and awoke early. It was exactly seven o’clock when he steered his car off the narrow hill road onto Highway 56.
An hour and a half later he pulled into the wide gravel parking area in front of the junction restaurant. The building was long and low, covered with red shingles, sitting diagonally in its location to face the right angle formed by the meeting of highways. One wing was obviously a dance hall. The Venetian blinds at the windows of this wing were closed, and it had the drab, depleted look that seems to come by day to all places that live by night. The central part of the building and the other wing were the restaurant and the kitchen. In the corner of the window beside the entrance was a large sign with crude black letters that said: Open.
He got out of the car and went insid
e and climbed onto a stool at a long counter. Behind the counter, a waitress in a starched white uniform filled a thick tumbler with water and set it in front of him. She had hair the color of rust and as dry as hay. The flesh below her eyes was dark and sagging, and her face must have been put on in the dark. She stared wearily over his head, waiting for him to speak.
“Just coffee,” he said.
She filled a cup from a glass pot and set it on the counter, slopping a little of the black brew over into the saucer. Beside it, she put a miniature milk bottle filled with cream. He pushed the cream aside and lifted the cup, twisting on the stool in order to look out through the plate glass window to the gravel parking area in front.
“What time’s the next bus to Kaw City due?” he said.
“Eight-fifty-five. Five minutes now.”
He looked at his watch and verified it. “Thanks,” he said.
He lit a cigarette and sat alternating swallows of black coffee with inhalations of smoke, and suddenly he remembered that this was Etta’s habit, and he wondered with a trace of bitterness that was far too weak to signify incipient rebellion if his unconscious adoption of it was a measure of his seduction. He had just finished the cigarette and the coffee when the bus pulled up beyond the window and stopped with a series of pneumatic gasps.
At first he thought she hadn’t come. The single passenger to alight, a woman, stood for a moment beside the bus and then picked up a cheap yellow suitcase and crossed to the entrance of the restaurant and inside. Her short hair was the color of platinum, in startling contrast with her dark eyes. Her vivid scarlet mouth was like a soft, wet wound. She was wearing a cheap fur coat that hung open from the shoulders to expose a green knit dress that clung to her body as if it were charged with static electricity. She walked with a practiced swaying of hips on spike-heeled green sandals fastened to her ankles by narrow straps. She was crude and vulgar and beautiful. The impression she made was like a physical impact. With dye and paint and the emphasis of natural assets, she frankly elicited a primitive reaction.
Standing by Peter’s stool in a cloud of heavy scent, she said, “That your car outside, Mister?”
“That’s right.”
“Going to Kaw City?”
“Yes.”
“How about giving a girl a lift?”
“What was the matter with the bus?”
She shrugged. “So times are tough. So my ticket ran out. You want a character reference for a lousy lift?” Her voice was coarse, a voice he had never heard before, a product of gin and a million cigarettes. He laughed and dropped a dime on the counter and stood up.
“When I give a girl a lift, I prefer her not to have any character. You ready to go, or do you want coffee?”
“I’m ready.”
They went outside to the car, and he wheeled it onto the highway and across the junction. She laughed softly, stretching her body in the seat beside him, and he thought he could hear in the laughter a kind of restrained exultation, and it occurred to him suddenly that she was feeling an intense sense of release, of freedom, as if her changed appearance were not so much disguise as the abandonment of one, the assumption at last of the overt expression of herself.
“My God,” she said, “I feel awful. How do you like me, Peter?”
“Just asking?”
She laughed again and pressed against him. “Was it bad, darling? The waiting? Was it very bad?”
“It was bad.”
“It won’t go on forever. Remember that.”
“This time will be longer.”
“It can’t be helped. This is the way it has to be done. You know it is.”
“I know. Is our dentist definitely in?”
“He’s in. For ten grand plus.”
“What does the plus mean?”
“He thinks it means me. I’m supposed to contact him after you’ve been disposed of.”
“What happens when you don’t?”
“Nothing happens. He’ll be an accessory to murder, and there won’t be any thing at all that he can do about it.”
“I almost wish he’d try. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like killing someone just for fun.”
“Don’t think crazy, Peter. He’s an arrogant fool. We’ll use him and drop him off with his stinking ten grand and that’s all of it.”
“When do you want to die?”
“The sooner the better. Tomorrow night, if possible.”
“What if they don’t go to Foresman about the teeth?”
“They will. He’s my dentist, and the teeth will be all they’ll have to identify me with. That’s your job, Peter. You’ve got to be sure there’s nothing else left.”
“I’ll make sure.”
“Who will you use?”
He shrugged. “Who knows: Someone.”
Someone. Nobody. An indefinite pronoun waking at this moment, perhaps, in some drab room to the gray light of another drab day, remembering with sickness or indifference, but certainly not pleasure, the traffic of the spent night. He wondered for the first time who she was and where she had come from and whether, in the end, she would mind so much dying for a reason she would never know. Dying violently, a small and essential technicality, because she happened to be available and had a set of teeth.
Then he was struck by a wild thought. What if she had plates? What if they were to find in the charred wreckage of the car at the foot of the bluff beside the river a set of dentures? It would be a wonderful example of the biter bit, the kind of ending you found in the little one page stories. The thought adhered to his mind, swelling with enormous significance and grim comedy, and he began to laugh softly on the verge of hysteria, his body shaking with the effort to contain the laughter.
Etta drew away and looked at him sharply. “What’s the matter, Peter?”
“Nothing. I just thought of something.”
“Of what?”
“I was wondering what would happen if she had false teeth.”
“For God’s sake, Peter, cut it out! You’re not breaking up on me are you?”
“I thought it was very funny.”
“I don’t like it when you think and talk crazy.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“All right. Just take it easy. And you’d better let up on the bourbon, too. You’ll never make it through this in a fog.”
“Don’t worry about it, I said. I’ll be all right.”
“Sure, darling. You’ll be all right. You’ll be fine.”
She relaxed against him again, and he drove on into the city in silence. The highway fed them through suburban and urban residential districts into the congestion of the downtown area, and at last she said. “Let me off at the bus station. Peter.”
“Where are you going from there?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find a room.”
“How shall I contact you?”
“I’ll rent a box at the post office. I’ll let you know the number as soon as I get it. I’ll tell you what name to use, too.” Reaching into her purse, she handed him a piece of cardboard stamped with black and red numbers. “Here’s the claim check for my Olds. It’s parked in the garage across from the Envoy Hotel. You can pick it up there when you’re ready. The Senator’s at the Capitol and will be there for at least another week. I left home yesterday and told the servants I’d probably be returning tomorrow night. Do it then if you can. They’ll think it happened when I was coming back.”
“All right.”
He pulled into the unloading zone in front of the bus station, and she got out quickly and removed her suitcase from the rear. Leaning through the open window, she said, “You take it from here, darling. You know what to do so do it well, and do it fast. Later, when you think it’s right for the finish, send me the word and I’ll come back.”
“I’ll let you know.”
He leaned toward her across the seat, and their lips met in brief, hot adherence, and then she turned and walked swiftly away, her hips swaying in t
he exaggerated rhythm of her new character, the cheap yellow case swinging at her side. He watched her until she turned the corner and disappeared.
CHAPTER 6.
It was a mean and narrow street on the lower side of the city where the earth declined from its suburban heights to the level of the river. The black water lapped in the night at its low embankment. Along the street at wide intervals, street lamps cast light like yellow grease in stagnate puddles on old brick, exposing here and there the ugly debris of the life that passed and shed its odds and ends in passing—paper and cans, the shards of broken bottles.
At the curb near the corner, Peter parked Etta’s Olds, a gleaming incongruity of bright chrome and enamel. Walking down the sidewalk along the faces of crumbling buildings to a dim and solitary rectangle of weak light in the mass of surrounding darkness, he turned and stepped up into a short hall. From beyond a closed door at the end of the hall came the pulsing, wanton rhythms that marijuana makes. On a straight chair beside the door, tilted back against the wall with heels hooked over the chair rungs, was a fat man with bleary, colorless eyes and a slack mouth half open in an expression of witless decadence. The bleary eyes moved over Peter indifferently as he went past and through the door.
The torrid music was like a blast of hot wind. Smoke drifted horizontally in wavering strata. The small dance area was congested with writhing anatomy. At tables and in booths, inhibitions had largely ceased to function. Peter found an empty stool at the bar and crawled on. No one paid any attention to him, and he sat waiting, watching in the mirror behind the bar the action on the dance floor. After a while, as he had anticipated, there was a voice at his shoulder.
“Drinking alone, honey?”
He shifted his eyes in the mirror to the reflection of a thin and gutted face that achieved by device and the kindness of shadows a suggestion of the prettiness it had once had. The skin was dry and sallow, sunken between sharp bones. It was, he thought, a face that might have been ravished and dehydrated by a high fever.
“I’m not drinking at all,” he said. “How do you get service?”
The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack Page 14